THE YULE-LOG AND THE MISTLETOE

In much the same broad significance as the pine tree comes the symbolism of the Yule Log. As the log again portrays outdoor nature, its ritual treatment within the house differs only in form from that of the green pine by the brightness of the ornaments. In the case of the log the "fire" is actually produced, as the wooed is placed directly on the hearth and burned. Here the emblemism of being "consumed in the fire" is introduced. All Bible students are familiar with this figure of the lower, coarser elements of man's composition, the dross and the chaff, being cast into the fiery furnace and utterly consumed. This carries the significance here. The log of wood, creation of the natural world, speaks of the natural man with all his gross propensities springing from the carnal nature. Under so many names and figures in the old Scriptures these are to be defeated, routed and slain by the sword of the spirit of God. The "animal" was to be burned upon the four-square altar of the doubly-dual nature of man. In this world of mingled soul and body fires, flames of pure spiritual consciousness being smudged by lurid flames of the sensual instincts, the mightier potency of the diviner flame conquers in the end and coarse matter is burned out, leaving the flame clear and beauteous. The Egyptians called the body wherein these two fires contend for mastery "the crucible of the great house of flame." Again they denominated the earth, or the earthy body of man, "the Pool of the Double Fire." The chaff is cast into the fiery furnace of earthly passion and consumed. The burning of the Yule log on the hearth in the old days stands as beautiful typism of this great segment of the festival's meaning.

Then there is the strong suggestive symbolism of its being burned on the hearth in the home of humans. It is obvious that the word "hearth" is closely connected with "heart." The hearth well represents in the house the innermost holy of holies of the sacred temple of religion. It is in the deepest mind and soul of the human that this conversion of the lower elements of his nature into the all-consuming fire of redeeming love takes place. The hearth of old times was the center and, so to say, the altar of the family life. Fitting and impressive it is, then, that the Yule log be laid upon the hearth and in the very heart of the home be lighted up and transformed into the type of spiritual and deific essence.

High up on the great oak grew the mistletoe, so uniquely employed by the Druids--whose name is derived from the Greek word meaning "oak"--as a symbol of the divine elevation of the soul in man. Its semantic import stems from the fact that it is a parasite and grows aloft on the branches of its host. Of most pertinent significance it is that it does not draw its sustenance directly from the earth, but secondarily lives upon a growth that does extract its strength and nutriment of energy transmuted from earthly elements, in combination with the vital essences it can abstract from the air, the sun and the rain.

From these basic data the plant becomes an apt figure of the Christos. For the Christ-self grows high up on the tree of the natural life, and likewise must draw its sustenance from what the nature-growth has drawn up from earth and converted into forms of nourishment for its rootage and support. This phase of the imagery will glow more brilliantly in the light of the candle symbol. But it shines out clearly here as well. The Christ nature can not evolve and blossom to mature loveliness unless sustained from below by the products of the life of the physical organism. It is, in a strictly symbolic sense also a parasite, living on the physical body of its host. The divine plan countenances this interdependence of host and guest on the successive planes of nature. A lower material organism must play host to a higher life energy, while the latter on its part ensouls the form that sustains it in the dual relationship.

The idea of lovers kissing under the mistletoe sprig accentuates the conception that the birth of the Christ follows upon the union of the two lovers in man's nature, the spirit-soul and the body-soul. The mistletoe suggests the Christ, born high up on the evolutionary tree of life, subsisting upon that tree's natural elements, and generated by the union of the "female" physical components of the tree's life derived from the soil with the "male" spiritual principles of the air and the sun. On our planet there is no life generable without the union of these four elements. The mistletoe symbolizes this union of the human and divine, or male and female, elements, the "kissing" or commingling of which bring the Christ to his birth.

THE PARCHED WHEAT

A Nordic custom of the Christmas celebration that has fallen into desuetude was that of sprinkling wheat on the doorstep outside the house or upon the hearth inside, or of parching wheat in the fire of the Yule log. It should need no dissertation to elucidate the significance of wheat and its edible product, bread, in religious literature. John, Paul, the Christ figure himself and many another allegorist of the spiritual life have made wheat and bread the great central symbol of the divine soul in man. "This is that bread which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more." The Christos says that his (spiritual) body is the bread of life, broken into pieces that all may eat of it, and that all who will eat of it shall have eternal life.

But the allegorical genius of the ancients pictured the unground and unbaked grain as the "raw" or undeveloped germ of future Christhood, the seed of divinity that had to undergo planting in the soil of human nature, initial "death" in that dark underworld, then germination, growth and eventual ripening of its manifold harvest in the perfected product. This process wrote the history of the youthful Sons of God as they first descended into incarnation, being planted in the ground of human life, "dying" as divinities to be reborn as men, regaining their Paradise through growth and evolution, and returning to the Father's house as victors over the world and the power of matter. These pure "virgin souls" (for they were named in India Kumaras, meaning "virgin youths," "celibate young men," since they were children of God, born of his eternal mind, not yet ever wedded to material bodies and now in their first descent into bodily life) were likened to the raw wheat grain, needing to be ground, mealed, baked and made nourishing for man. So St. Paul says: "And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body." This is to remind us that God does not plant in our nature the full-grown tree of the Christ consciousness, but only its seed potential. Failure to recognize this true element in religious ideology has led to untold fanaticism and dementia.

This "bare grain" of inexperienced and undeveloped divinity is to suffer maceration, to be refined, then mixed with "water," then baked and finally eaten by man for his eternal nutriment. Have we sufficient analogical skill to see that the grinding, the milling, the flouring of the raw grain is just the breaking up of the unity of Christhood on its own high level, as it is fragmented in its division and partition amongst the bodies of mortals, and its crushing between the good and evil of the rough human experience undergone in its life as the ensouling principle in mortal bodies? The Christ himself in the drama says that we must eat his "body which is broken for you."

In the apocryphal Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans there is found one of the most striking analogical depictions of this process in all Christian literature, in the passage in which the soul, speaking, says: "For I am the wheat of God; and I shall be ground between the teeth of the wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." Ground between the teeth of the wild animals indeed is its fate, for the allegory refers to these animal bodies of ours within whose constitution it makes its earthly sojourn. The bare wheat grain is the descending virgin soul of divinity; the animals are these bodies of ours; the grinding is the crushing and bruising between the upper and the nether millstone of our dual nature; the water that cements the flour into cake form is the watery nature of the body; the fire that bakes the cakes is the double fire of heavenly flames of love and the murky flares of the "earthly, sensual, devilish" lower self that rage within us; and the "pure bread of Christ" is the finally perfected and fully nourishing cake of the divine soul glorified. God plants the wheat grains of his generated children in the soil of humanity, and looks to see the milling and the cake-baking take place in the "crucible of the great house of flame." The Egyptian Book of the Dead tells of the soul being "moistened with water and roasted with fire in the underworld." And the underworld, let mystified scholars be enlightened at last, is this world of ours.

A shorter symbol, or analogue, that quite well carried the same broad meaning was the parching of the raw wheat grains. Parched wheat is itself a tasty and nutritious edible. So that to scatter wheat about the door, or to parch it on the hearth, especially in the flames of the Yule log, was to dramatize faithfully the purifying and divinizing experience of the soul in the progress of its development of the Christ nature through life in the flesh.

THE CANDLE IN THE WINDOW

And the candle with its encircling halo of mystical radiance--what is its message of beauty and significance? More wonderfully even than the pine tree and the Yule hearth-fire and the holly does this enlightening symbol of the Christ-birth announce its meaning for the intelligence of thinking man. Here is the flame that connotes the fire of deific being in the mortal constitution. It is attached to and holds its connection with the body of animal tallow by means of the wick, tipped by flame at its top, but immersed deeply in a body of animal derivation below. The wick corresponds to the animal soul, or psyche, which in the human organism is the connecting principle between spirit-soul and physical body. Then there is the solid body of oil-rich material from the animal world. The candle thus constitutes an almost exact reduplication of the organization of the three bodies in man.

The power of spirit, represented by the flame, is imparted to the wick by the energies of intelligence in an order of conscious being far transcending the physical world. From the wick it is brought into relation with the tallow, typifying the lower world. In the meeting of these two, flame and tallow, takes place the physical-chemical operation that should speak in voluble tones to the mystical sense of mankind. By the power inherent in its nature the flame is able to act upon the tallow so as to change its state from solid to liquid, then from liquid to gaseous, and in this form convert it, transmute it, into the essence of its own magically powerful nature. Thus it continues to feed upon the strength of the elements below it in the structure and so perpetuates its existence in the manifest world.

The parallel with man's life is perfect. The flame of divine spirit at the summit of his nature communicates itself through the intermediary wick of the human-animal soul to the elements of the animal-body itself. These it continues to refine and sublimate through its efficacious contact with their more sluggish nature, until in the end it converts them "into the likeness of its own glorious body," as St. Paul phrases it. It is the fire of divinity within us that, while drawing its own nourishment and prolonging its own existence in the body by feeding upon the lower elements of the physical, is at the same time lifting that body into its upper kingdom by its power of transubstantiation, a mystery that must be thought of in the terms of a spiritual alchemy. The flame of spirit-soul feeds upon the subordinate elements of man the natural, the while it converts them into the similitude of its own transcendent life. Such is the grandiloquent message of the Christmas candle in the window or above the altar, proclaiming silently, but beautifully the birth of the Christos.

The philosophical moral of this elucidation is all too likely to be missed by those "spiritual" cultists of the present day who most need to be impressed with what the wondrous analogue has to teach them in correction of their overweening laudation of "spirit" and corresponding derogation of "matter." One who has ever deeply reflected on the candle flame as he sees it replenished, refueled by the contribution of baser matter to its maintenance can never again join the blatant chorus of philosophical condemnation of matter. Without matter to feed its life, spirit could not for a moment maintain its connection with living experience in the world, and its own evolution would be at a standstill. All too much of unschooled philosophy has berated matter, decried spirit's alliance with it and characterized the soul's relation to it as its sin and fall into degradation. Orthodox theology has tainted its systematism with the same allegation of the "fall" into matter and generation.

But all this is simply an unbalanced and unintelligent mishandling of subtle elements of the old cosmic dramas. Soul's linkage with matter in incarnation is the natural and wholly salutary and beneficent planting of a seed in its proper soil. Without the union of seed and soil there can be no new growth. The human body and its sensuous life provide the fertile soil; the unit of soul consciousness is the divine seed. Spirit must be able to relate itself to matter so as to be able to draw upon the sustaining power of the energy in the atom if it is to establish itself anew in a cycle of growth.

It is time the endless prattle of ages against what early Christian doctrinism called "the malignancy of matter" be silenced by the fuller understanding of the eternal role of benignant purpose which matter plays in the cosmic evolutionary economy. God produced his material creation, sun, moon, stars, earth, animals, vegetation, man; and pronounced it good. Only erring half-taught religionists have pronounced it evil. The religion that has implanted the universal idea that man was born in sin because the soul came to share the life of the flesh has projected a most baleful influence into the stream of human ideology. Man's life would rise many grades in the scale of dignity and happiness if he would cease to despise his body. Of a surety his flesh is not to dominate him. But it is to be honored for the indispensable and noble service which it performs together with the soul. A sound philosophy will not heap contumely on the flesh, the handmaid of the soul.

THE STAR IN THE EAST

The star of Bethlehem and the three Magi it guided across the Arabian desert! Are they to be taken as historical actualities? Hardly. Many Christian writers no longer view them in this light. They are classed as legend and poetry. They constitute another of those splendid allegories of the ascent of bright spirit from out the region of material night to regain celestial glory. "We have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him." So spake the three "Wise Men" from the East at the birth of Christos.

The Messiah comes not as a single unit of consciousness, but as a threefold power. It is Spirit-Soul-Mind; three in one, yet one in three. He comes, so to say, and his advent brings his three aspects to manifestation; or he comes as these three. Spirit, as manifest in the flesh, is ever a trinity of faculties. Its lowest facet, the only one that comes immediately into the brain consciousness, is Mind. Above that stands Soul, and still higher is Spirit. As these three rays of his power may be said to constitute his coming in three forms, they are said to accompany him to earth. And as their combined development is what in reality brings him here, they are said to come to pay homage to him. They combine to consummate his greatness and completeness. In the Gospel allegory this relation to him came out as "worship."

As to the star--what is it? Can it be taken astronomically? Again and most emphatically, no! Even staid astronomers, deluded by the commonly assumed historicity of the Gospel story, have childishly gone on record as affirming that "somewhere near" the time of Jesus' birth there was an exceptional and rare conjunction of five of the planets. Only a few years ago we witnessed the interesting spectacle of five of the planets closely bunched in the western sky of evening. The phenomenon brought no birth of divinity, with the most savage of all wars going on at the time. The guileless astronomers had overlooked the statement in Matthew's Gospel that made their guessing weird and preposterous. "Now the star came and stood over the place where the young child was." Let us picture Jupiter--itself some hundred times larger than the earth,--Saturn, Mars, Neptune and Uranus, all crowding in the heavens directly above the tiny stable in Bethlehem village! It is not to be overlooked that such irrationality is only one instance of the havoc that religious infatuation and hypnotization can work in otherwise capable minds.

The Star of Bethlehem is the bright radiance of the divine soul shining in the innermost recesses of evolving human minds, and rising with man as he emerges, symbolically on the east, from out the dark night of his immersion in matter and body. As it grows to its adult state the soul becomes a shining star of bright ray in the human head. When it shines forth there arises the gleam of its manifestations as the three "spiritual magicians." The bursting out of the light of this triple star upon infant humanity, as the race begins to incorporate Christly principle in its action, is naturally pictured as bringing the three Mages or Sages of wisdom to the earthly cradle where, all meanly wrapped in swaddling clothes of earthly flesh, he lies pictured as the infant at the beginning of his career to redeem animal man to divinity. Their offering of gifts of incense, sweet myrrh and gold betokened their contribution to his unified completeness. Gold emblems the highest life of spirit; incense is the sweet odor of balsam treated with fire, the symbol of nature transmuted by soul; and myrrh is the sweet-savored vegetable that typifies the natural contribution to the life of spirit.

Somewhat akin in significance to the red holly berry and the poinsettia was the red rose of Christmas symbolism. Pictured on the cross at the junction of the two arms, it emblemed the Christ-birth as the product of spirit and matter "crossed" in the life of man. Like the Glastonbury thornbush it, too, was legendarily asserted to bloom at midnight of Christmas Eve. As the "tree" of the cross on which the Christ was crucified was dramatized as the far-descended branch of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, so the Christmas rose on the cross was supposed to have blossomed forth in December as a stem from Jesse's ancient rod of divinity. As a sixteenth century German carol puts it:

I know a rose-tree spring

Forth from an ancient root,

As men of old were singing.

From Jesse came the shoot

That bore a blossom bright

Amid the cold of winter,

When half-spent was the night.

By ancient symbolic reckoning the solstitial period in December marked the half-way point in the "night" of the soul's incarnation. And it was precisely at this point, also by symbolic connotations, that the Christ principle ended its sleep of "death" in matter and was quickened to a new birth. The Christ was the red rose flowering at midnight in the solstice of "winter." As Jesse was the father of David this Christ-rose was in the other tradition of Jewry to be the Messiah "born of David's line" in the city of "Bethlehem."

"CAROL, BROTHERS, CAROL"

The carols of Christmas must have their due place in the exposition. These musical ballads that thousands of throats send throbbing in sincere joyousness up to the rafters of churches embody man's most blithesome expression of his Christmas spirit. Many are magnificent beyond words. If all those who sing could catch the faintest true conception of the awesome burden of the profounder esoteric significance of the sonorous phrases chorused at the Yuletide, their hearts and minds would fairly palpitate with the overmastering realization of the grandeur of the human-divine epic hidden in these majestic runes.

A Christmas Eve service in an Episcopalian Church attended by the present writer in 1953 opened with the tenor solo sung before the processional. The program announced that it was considered to be the oldest known Christmas carol, dating away back of the fifth century. It was sung in Latin and simply hailed the Christ, son of the Virgin Mary. But the first four words suddenly struck the mind with the most acute realization of their profounder significance. They were as follows: "A solis natus carine . . ." Referring to the Christ, these words said that he was "born on the hinge of the sun." The astonishing circumstance here was that if this was truly a Christian carol, it could be interpreted in clear meaning only by Pagan formulas! For Christianity knows nothing of the symbolism of the Christmas dating in relation to the winter solstice, or the fact that this dating allocates the divine birth to the conditions of the balance between soul and body, when soul, having reached the nadir of its descent into matter, slowly turns and pivots, as it were, on the hinge of the solstice to begin its upward path of return to heaven. The December solstice is the hinge on which descending soul swings around at the nadir; the June solstice is likewise the hinge of the sun at its upper turn. But the Christ is born in the "winter."

What is perhaps the most salient feature accentuated in the carols generally has been little noted. It is the oft-repeated linking of heaven and earth together in the jubilee, to stress mightily the fact that both hemispheres of life were beneficiaries of the great gift of Christhood to the world of men. The first verse of the fine old hymn, Joy to the World, well exemplifies this feature:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her king!

Let every heart prepare him room

And heaven and nature sing!

Heaven and earth are exhorted to sing together. We must ask why heaven is to join in rejoicing over the advent of divinity to this planet. Here we come back to the holly, the pine tree and the Yule log. Both nature on the one side and consciousness on the other were to be blessed by the descent of Messiah to earth. Nature, in the form and person of her top-most product, man physical, was to receive as her honored guest the spark of celestial fire, which under her tutelage would eventually elevate the natural man to the order and rank of divine intelligence. Nature was to have the germinal potential of soul implanted in her bosom, and only this tie gave it the chance to rise in the scale of developing being. It was indeed the great aeonial occasion for nature's rejoicing. She was to be elevated from blind instinct to mind.

As to heaven, it was the grand cosmic opportunity for those citizens of heaven, those deific mind-born Sons of God, to link their potential capabilities with the generative powers of matter and nature in human bodies, and thus achieve a new birth and further growth in the eternal advance. For both heaven's sons and nature's creation it was equally the grand event of all the ages. Well indeed might man and nature unite to celebrate the high festival. It meant a nearer approach to godhood for both, and full apotheosization for those already at the threshold of divinity. It was God's gift to them of a new reach and range of life that would in the event lift each to a higher kingdom of being, an expanded dimension of consciousness. If this is not the due occasion for both heaven and nature to rejoice, then creation furnishes no adequate ground for jubilation.

This analysis underlies the reason why the Christ's advent was proclaimed from heaven to men on earth. It rang from the skies. "Heaven's arches rang" with the exultant shouts of the celestial hosts, and "earth gave back the sound" from its plains below. Earth sent back to heaven the echo of its joyous halleluiahs, resounding throughout the empyrean. The hosts of the twelve legions of angels, sons of the God-Mind, who were preparing to migrate downward to our planet, would in the round of the aeon return rejoicing, victors over "death," having burst asunder the bars and gates of this lower "hell." It was the festal day of all the earth and no less the gala day for the angelic hosts above. The festival would lack its true import unless both men and angels alike realized its meaning in both spheres of being. For the event meant a new heaven for spirits of light and a new earth brightened with heavenly glory for men.

So angels in the clouds of heaven announced the coming to shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. As the Messiah coming in this era of the zodiacal cycle was to come in the sign of Aries, the Ram, when he was to be heralded as the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world, inevitably the drama personified these humans who were to domesticate and care for this tender Lamb in its infancy as "shepherds." So the annunciation was made to shepherds in the fields, in the night and winter of incarnation. It is said that no sheep are ever watched out in the fields of Palestine or Syria at night later than October of each year. Hence the allegorical character of the story is confirmed by its obvious non-historicity.

The pageantry of snowy winter attending the Messiah's birth is of course altogether Northern and astrological symbolism. It depicts the winter solstice and the Northern winter with its snow and all its poetic incitements. But the true sense of all this has been lost. The iciness of the season is the outward arctic symbol of the cold deadness of the soul when it has gone to its torpid sleep of inertness, its "hibernation" under nature's chilling spell and lies wrapped in unconsciousness, like the wheat grains in winter's soil, until awakened to new life and regeneration by April's strengthening sun.

At the solstice the sun stands still for a period of about ten days, neither losing nor gaining in its light. Here is the astrological symbol of spirit's equalized relation with matter, when it is weighed in the scales of the exact balance or equilibration between the forces of soul and body. Humanity at its present state stands at precisely this point of stabilization between the powers of soul and those of sense. In this close relation the opportunity is afforded to both these elements to consummate their interlocking and their "marriage" and produce the Christ-child as their offspring. Thus the solstice of winter is the zodiacal portraiture of every aspect of the relation of soul to body, out of which the Christos is to have its new generation.

Like the sun of late December, the unit of soul-mind has gone as far down the scale into matter's depths as it can go. There it stands, held fast by the equilibrated powers of matter. The two conflict and war with each other until their reconciliation is effected through the intermediary offices of the Christ as its power evolves. And the final at-one-ment is achieved as the two learn to synchronize their natures. With the harmony thus established comes the peace on earth and good-will among men that the angels announced to the shepherds.

But the horrid scroll of history since the first century belies any historical reference to the meaning of Messiah's coming at a given epoch in a given personality, and sets the seal of truth on the hypothesis that the Gospel story is the dramatic representation of man's total evolution to divinity, a goal which is yet to be achieved in anything like its fulness. It is far better to know that Messiah has not yet come--in the final sense of an overt event in objective history--than to cherish the common belief that he has come, and that succeeding history has displayed more in human savagery than any age before it. If what has eventuated in history since the divine event fulfills the meaning of Messiah's birth, there is little about which to sing halleluiahs and bedeck the hall with holly. The hope of humanity is in the realization that the Christ is yet to come, and to come not in any manger bed or chamber of luxury, but to reign as King of Love in the lives of individuals and in the statecraft of the nations. To proclaim that Messiah has come--and left the world groveling in brutish lust for butchery--would be to crush man's spirit in despair.

The failure of two thousand "blithe Noels" to bring the Christly spirit to birth in the world is easily accounted for. Taken as overt historical event occurring personally to one man, and not understood as the implantation of the "bare grain" of the future growth of godliness in all hearts, the mighty cathartic and transforming force of the accolade to infant deity went out from all hearts and dissipated itself upon the imagined figure of this one alleged personage, when it was intended that it should go inward to work its benign efficacy upon all souls. The Christ was objectively heralded but not subjectively received. He was hailed out there in history, but not welcomed into the inn of each heart. Homage was lavished upon his physical personality, when his spiritual body should have been sacrificially eaten and psychically assimilated. The enormous collective stream of psychic adoration doubtless focused over the mythical stable in Bethlehem and formed a veritable Shekinah there. And there it is reanimated and reinforced year after year at Christmas. But, if the quality and character of Western history be a competent criterion, evidently there it stays. Bethlehem receives a vast emotional inundation; somehow the rest of the world is left without beatitude. The Yule greeting goes out voluminously to Judea; all too obviously it does not return to the senders. It is spent outwardly upon a supposed historical event, and apparently exhausted in the spending. The vast psychic outpouring is wasted upon the symbol, when the symbol, its majestic connotation converted into the realities of love and brotherhood, should generate the wondrous leaven of universal charity and send it pulsing through all the hearts in the world.

The historization of the drama and the beautiful allegory swallowed up the spiritual efficacy of the annual ritual, and therefore simply failed to carry home to any minds the pivotal truth on which its beneficent leavening of humanity entirely depended. The nub of the great sweeping significance was the cardinal truth that unless the Christ be born, loved, reared and exalted as ruler in the conscious life of every individual mortal, his birth has not been brought to pass. One birth in Bethlehem is not enough to leaven the world. All men must be reborn, and only in this collective rebirth is the Christos born. If he is not reborn in each heart, he has had his birth nowhere. He can not be born outside of human hearts, minds and consciences. What good could one man's divine love do in a world rankling with the petty selfishness of individuals and the unrelenting animosity of nations? Christos will be born, Messiah will come, when Love reigns in the human breast, and humanity will be born as it gives birth to the King of Love. Philips Brooks in his touching O Little Town of Bethlehem pleads that the spirit of Christos Be born in us today.

If Christmas does not implant the spirit of divine love ever more deeply in all souls, it is celebrated in vain. And never will the festival of gladness generate its high cathartic power to spiritualize the race until, instead of the physical birth of one babe in the impossible Bethlehem story (taken as history), the anniversary at the solstice speaks volubly to every intelligent human of the birth within the area of his own consciousness of the soul of divine graciousness and compassion.

BETHLEHEM AND BETHANY

Bethlehem itself is hardly to be taken geographically in connection with the event. Scholars have been unconscionably slow to derive any central significance from the etymology of the town name. Beth-lehem means, as any Hebrew knows, "the house of bread." This was an emblematic designation of the house of Virgo, the Virgin in the Zodiac. The wheat symbolized by the great star Spica in that house of the heavens emblemed the Christ coming as the divine bread to be eaten mystically by all souls. (See the author's The Lost Light for a full and revealing elaboration of this entire theme.) Indeed it could be affirmed that the ancient books would have proclaimed the Christ-birth as "occurring" in Bethlehem even if no such town had stood on the map; or rather they would have seen to it that a town appropriately located according to some semantic scheme would have been given the name of Bethlehem. (That the name of this particular town is to be accounted for in this way is indeed fairly probable, for this was the ancient religious custom.) For some thousands of years the venerable documents of Egypt allocated the Messianic birth to the town of Annu (Anu) in the Nile valley. In Annu, the books stated, Christ had gone to his "death" and there he would be born again. And it is a breath-taking discovery in Comparative Religion study that Anu is in one passage described as the "place of multiplying bread."

This Egyptian background can not be discounted as the genuine source of the "miracle" in which Jesus feeds the five thousand enhungered gathering by multiplying the loaves and fishes. The Greeks named Anu Heliopolis, the "city of the sun," the spiritual city where the sun of divine soul went to its "death" and had its resurrection. Anu in the Egyptian system was the place of increasing the divine bread of eternal life! And this "city" is finally the human body itself, where soul first goes to its "death," then has its glorious resurrection. Likewise this "city" is Beth-lehem, the house of bread, when the zodiacal symbolism is transferred from Egyptian to Hebrew name and type. Egypt had proclaimed the solstitial birth of the Son of God ages before it became the current legend in Hebrew hands.

What little there is to Christmas that can be claimed as distinctively Christian is itself marred by misguided comprehension of its relevance and quite erroneous application of its symbolism. It is almost a wholly Pagan festival that we celebrate. The dire tragedy is that we no longer have the perspicacity to discern in it the transcendent glory of the original Pagan significations. The gala-day of all human-divine history goes off as a mere anniversary celebration in the spirit of a worldly carnival. That few observe it in the exalted appreciation of its profound mystical values bespeaks the depths of our philosophical failure and the decay of our culture.

YULE AND NOEL

It remains to build up the structure of the two familiar names attached closely to the Christmas gaiety. They are Yule and Noel. Nowhere has there been seen any scholar's derivation of Yule from its obvious philological sources. It almost incontestably springs from the ancient Egyptian name of Deity, IU, meaning "(the Deity) who comes," and the Hebrew EL, "God." Its total rendering would then read: "The Deity that comes as God," or, more simply, "the coming God." The Egyptians many times called Horus, or Iusa, "he who comes regularly and continually," and in hymns he is hailed and appealed to as "The Comer!" IU is the verb meaning "to come." In course of Nordic and Anglic transmission, the IU became YU and the EL more phonetically conjoined to it as LE, giving us in the end YULE. As the Divinity under zodiacal symbolism "came" at the winter solstice, the late December period became designated as the Yuletide and its festival "the Yule."

As to Noel, adopted as the French name for Christmas, the same terminal el unites here with the Greek root of all words meaning divine knowledge, the primal root of the Greek verb gignosko, "to know," and the no in the English word "know." No is the Greek stem meaning the divine noetic mind of God, or in essence and potentiality the mind of the Christ. The Greek word for "mind" is itself Nous, meaning of course the cosmic Mind. Noel would then mean "the mind of God," as manifested in his Son or Sons born on earth. The birthday of the Christly principle was allocated to the winter solstice. When, therefore, choirs chant joyously "Sing We All Noel!", the import is that we mortals can in this festive celebration exult in the birth or initial advent of that same mind which was also in Christ into the scope of our conscious life. And certainly earth offers nothing more worthy of rhapsodic song from mortal lips than this event. If we fail to rise to ecstatic joy over the contemplation of this crucial episode in our racial history, we are "stocks and stones, and worse than senseless things" indeed.

So potent, however, is a symbolic ritual that, even though the millions who enact the annual ceremonials and go to the considerable labor and sacrifice of presenting the round of gifts year after year have little or no real conception of the explicit meaning of their activities, they still catch something of the inexplicable impressiveness of the occasion. In spite of the fact that the meaning escapes the individual celebrant as a commemoration of an evolutionary crisis and the end and beginning of distinct epochs, and adumbrates a spiritual transformation that he can consummate for himself, still the sheer beauty of the symbolism and imagery of the memorial, standing in their purely external form, reaches deeply into the psychic consciousness and stirs there profound intimations of human brother-hood and the love emotion. For a few short hours on December twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth the Christian world is brought to some measure of realization of the loveliness of charity and fraternity. Worldly cares, anxieties and concerns of the daily struggle are forgotten for an interlude, while elders enter into the glee of childhood elated over engaging toys. A brief foretaste of what it would be to live in a world of amity and heartfelt good-will is enjoyed, a bit wonderingly. But all too quickly the glow of humanism fades, the carols give way to the prevalent decadent "pep music," and the daily interests and the tone of secularity crowd out the new-born Christ spirit from the heart.

Christmas is the salvation to a large extent of what true Christian spirit is extant. Its anticipatory eagerness and the momentary touch of fellowship engendered by it keep the soul of brotherhood from threatened extinction in the modern world of science and engrossment in the externalities of existence.

But it is the earnest presentment of this essay that if to the external beauty of the Yuletide ritualism there was added the full intellectual apprehension of the precise symbolic significance of all the conventional customs perpetuated in beautiful traditional fashion every year, there would be released from out the subliminal depths of man's divine subconscious potential such a flood of Christly love, born of beauty and understanding combined, as would sweep Christianity into the hearts and minds of the age. This would come because it would touch and bestir in man's deeper nature the latent powers of the Christ consciousness themselves. With their awakening would come the birth and later the adult development of the Christ mind. It would bring the spiritualization of the world, the apotheosization of humanity.

The force of ritual is powerful in its sheer outward performance. Even when its forms and movements are without rational appeal, they stir the soul to feelings of beauty. But if there was added the still more potent force that would flow in powerfully from the mind's clear grasp of the symbolic intimations of the rites, the operation would lift the very soul to moments of ineffable exaltation. This is precisely the psychological element lacking in the festival's annual incidence, the one factor requisite to make it the efficacious channel of spiritual purgation and uplift.

The mind is unquestionably the central dynamo of all psychological energizations. But merely outward feelings sensually excited by pageantry, no matter how beautiful in themselves, can not bestir the soul's deepest sensibilities as profoundly and as lastingly as can the logical cognitions of understanding. Philosophy is the mother of understanding and that in turn of affectional states, and these set the norm and tenor of individual stability and psychic integration, the health of the mind carrying the health of the body with it.

Instead of being merely a periodic recurrence of gifting and a happy time for children, with a few carols thrown in, Christmas could be the occasion of a veritable annual re-baptism of the conscious mind in a flood of supernal benignancy released from the hovering Oversoul of divinity, the immanent-transcendent God within man, that would constitute a periodical cathartic purification of the soul and a dynamic regeneration of the spirit in the body. It carries an ordination of ancient wisdom designed to utilize astronomical features of the season to impress upon human understanding the significance for man himself of all that which the outer natural phenomena can adumbrate for him of the interrelation of soul-consciousness and mundane body.

Like the winter sun, his own sun-soul has gone down into the underworld of material darkness and lies "dead" and inert in that cave of earth. The solstice tells him that for the period of the human evolution that soul of his is bound in with matter in a state of stabilization, or equilibration of its energies. For a long time--pictured by the ten days of the solstice--that soul, a divine unit in its own right--will wage an even battle with the elemental powers of this plane of existence. But slowly the cycle will swing around past its solstice, the soul will begin to gain on the inertia of matter and the sluggish inhibitions of body; and finally it will have put all material powers under its feet, and emerge victor over "death" and the "grave."

ANGELIC SONGS ARE RINGING

These ennobling truths the seasonal festival will impress upon human intellection with ever more realistic cogency; until the tree, the holly, the lights and star, the candle, the cradled babe, the carols and the organ will release such a tide of sweeping realizations in man's psychic realm as will cause his heart to throb in thrilled ecstasy, with access of a more than joyous sense of brotherhood of mortals linked together in the bonds of cosmic beneficence. A choir marching past him in a church aisle, with each singer carrying a lighted candle, and pouring out the strains of

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,

Glory to the New-Born King.

will lift the psyche close to the level where truly the song of angelic voices might be caught in mystic enchantment. And as surges of transcendent emotion of beauty, love and goodness inundate his mind, he will indeed realize what in truth it means to give glory to the new-born King. For it will carry far beyond the mere outward idea of paying homage to a babe in remote time and place--beautiful though this is as symbol--and cause to glow within the breast that star of inner light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

There are those who have been impressed with this view of the Yule festival and who mentally assent to its essential correctness. But they demur to it as a detraction from the psychic force and impressiveness of the holiday if it is thus reduced to a psychological and intellectual realization and not invigorated with its significance as the commemoration of a historical event of transcendent importance. They raise the demurrer that to denude it of all outer dress of historical association and leave it standing as mere drama of an internal and purely subjective ideation in consciousness sadly detracts from the realistic and affecting unction of the festival.

To this there must be entered here a vigorous counter-claim. No mistake could be greater than this assumption. History has now demonstrated that the impressive power of the festival, when based on its alleged historical foundations, has fallen short of the saving efficacy it should have yielded. The fact, strange but true, is that not only would the rituals not lose their dynamic dramatic power from the understanding that they are outward symbolizations of an internal spiritualizing process and not historical events reviewed in commemoration, but they would take on a tenfold greater force of psychic beatification from the recognition that it is a birth in all men and not in one single historical individual that they celebrate. Instead of going flat and meaningless because this view attaches no single event of history to them, the ritual would rise to unimaginable heights of exalting emotional power from the knowledge that they memorialize not one, but all spiritual rebirth in history, past and still to come. When the mind catches the universal and at the same time personal meaning and reference of the customs, the beauty of the observance will lift the consciousness to ineffable mystical experience. The weight of cosmic recognitions and intuitions of transcendent insight could become almost insupportable. It is a strange and illogical argument to contend that the profounder intellectual comprehension of the rites would diminish their force and their moving power. While the outer historical significance is lessened or even entirely dismantled, the Nativity legend and all the mythical episodes of the festival's background would be vested with a greater and more cogent aura of psychic pertinence than before. They would become lovelier than ever, since the mind has freighted them with meanings of dynamic import to the soul of the celebrant himself. They would bring their meaning and significance home to the individual and they would remain with him as a leaven of divinizing ferment from one Yule to the other.

The name, dignity and authority of "king" stands in much disesteem and disrepute in the world today. But the world sadly lacks the basis of that proper homage and worshipful reverence which it should never fail to accord to the true and rightful King of Righteousness, whose birth and later rising with healing in his wings the great Yuletide festival was set to commemorate. Until moderns can join their voices with angelic choirs caroling eternal praise to this King and thus by their own divine initiative seat him at last on the throne of the nations, the continued celebration of Christmas can avail little. Can there be any question whether it were better to hail a king in ancient Judea, or a king of Christly graciousness in the collective heart and mind of humanity? Human destiny hinges on the choice, as at this epoch in racial evolution the divine soul of humanity swings slowly around from outgrown animalism to the sweet charity of a heavenly grace on the solstitial "hinge of the sun."

The supreme message of the Yule is that we have been given, deep within the confines of our own natures, a divine babe of consciousness to raise from infancy to the fulness of the stature of his godly nature. His coming has linked us with the skies, for he is a child of celestial kingliness. Hence it is that the dominant note of Christmas joyousness is the uniting of our earthly voices with the choirs of heaven. Those choirs are chanting halleluiahs in jubilation over the gift of heaven to earth; on her part earth must lift her voice to hail in utter joy the advent of her divine visitant from the empyrean. So the Yule resounds with the strains of "angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold;" of hosts of heavenly citizens caroling "Peace on earth, good-will to men." And, in the deepest sense of its sublime connotation, the symbolism of angelic hosts filling the skies of Christmas-time with soul-lifting music must be translated psychically into the realities of surges of mystical sweetness sweeping through the upper areas of the human soul. For the angelic voices that man can hear are the echoes in his own consciousness of the outpouring of divine radiations of Love and Light from the mind of God. And man in his upward march must ultimately provide the wondrous answer to the question couched in the lines of the Christmas hymn:--

Hark! What mean those holy voices

Sweetly sounding through the skies?